


Of Cold Tile and Courgette Sex

by Boton



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Courgette Sex, Gen, Headaches & Migraines, Hurt/Comfort, John is a Very Good Doctor, Male Friendship, Mild Sherlock Whump, Not Sex with Courgettes, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-22
Updated: 2015-06-22
Packaged: 2018-04-05 16:42:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4187238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boton/pseuds/Boton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the course of solving a case, Sherlock ignores his transport for far too long and winds up spending a miserable night with a migraine.  By the next morning, he's learned a bit more about the difference between "colleague" and "friend."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Cold Tile and Courgette Sex

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, everyone has to write a migraine sickfic, right? It's a fandom rite of passage.
> 
> If you are reading this with a headache, I hope you get a little comfort from letting John take care of Sherlock in a similar situation. As always, please don't take medical advice from fan fiction writers.
> 
> This takes place sometime after "The Blind Banker."
> 
> Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes and his universe are the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock is the creation of the BBC and its partners, and of co-creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. This work is for my pleasure and that of my readers; I am not profiting from the intellectual property of those creators listed above.

Sherlock turned his head to look out the front window of Angelo’s, where he and John sat having their newly-traditional post-case celebratory dinner, and he felt his stomach drop with dismay. The lights of the passing taxis stabbed through his eye and the base of his neck began to throb. He was too late; he had let things go on too long, and now he was going to suffer the consequences.

He hoped desperately that he had, for once, read the clues wrong, but he knew that by the time he even paid them any heed, he was already in danger. He waved off dessert, rubbing his temple while John ordered the tiramisu, and he realized where he had erred.

It was true, what he told John: he found eating to be an unnecessary distraction while he worked on a case, diverting blood flow to something as mundane as digestion when a bit of hunger seemed to sharpen every sense and bring everything into hyperfocus. But even Sherlock Holmes’s body had its limits, and he knew better than to push things beyond 72 hours – 80 at most. The problem was, he simply forgot about eating at about the two-day mark, and this time it had been four days before he’d solved the case and he’d remembered to ingest something more substantial than tea. The Angelo’s dinner helped, but it came far too late.

And then there was the London weather. Thankfully, London was a fairly moderate climate compared to some he’d known, but the early summer days had been unseasonably hot and humid, followed by a cold front that was just now making fat drops start to hit the front windows of the restaurant. The sudden change was not helping things.

Finally, there was the case itself. While most people responded negatively to the pressure that came from a highly-stressful situation – in this case, finding a ring of jewel thieves – Sherlock thrived on the adrenaline. It was the let-down after that was the problem, and he could feel it now as he sat and waited for John to finish his dessert and drain the last of his wine and tell Angelo good-night and smile winningly at the pretty blonde at the next table and Sherlock had never wanted to leave a restaurant so badly in his entire life. 

He was about to get a migraine, and he had to get back home to deal with it.

***  
Every one of the 17 steps up to 221B seemed to jar his head just a bit more as the pair returned to their flat, John flush with the success of the case and the half-bottle of wine. Sherlock watched John make his way up to his bedroom, while Sherlock parted ways and headed for his own room.

In the short few months he had been living with John, Sherlock had grown surprisingly comfortable having a flatmate. He had looked askance at the idea when Mrs. Hudson had suggested it, but he was secretly pleased to find that sharing living space with someone as an adult was a vast improvement on doing so in uni. But John had never yet seen one of Sherlock’s rare migraines, and Sherlock didn’t think he cared to show that weakness just yet. He could handle it on his own, just as he had always done.

Stripping off his clothing and stuffing it haphazardly into the dry cleaning bag, he stumbled slightly as he went into the bathroom. Terrific. The characteristic disorientation had started. He stepped into the shower and turned on the spray, hoping the heat would push the pain back long enough that he could get to bed and sleep it off.

Sherlock returned to his bedroom, wearing just a towel, which he dropped onto the floor, and he grabbed the nearest t-shirt and pajama pants at hand. Pulling them on, he turned off the light and dropped into bed. The lights bleeding in through the blinds felt like knives to his optic nerves, and he felt the pressure in his head returning. It started as a pinch at the base of the right side of his neck and started to crawl upwards toward his skull; once it made it over the top, there’d be little he could do except suffer through it. He gingerly shaped his pillow into a cradle for his head and dropped into a fitful sleep, dreaming of the pain that he was actually experiencing but helpless to get up and do anything about it.

When he next opened his eyes, it was just gone half three, and the migraine had arrived in all of its terrible glory. The pain now reached from the base of his neck over the top of his head to his eyebrow, wrapping the entire right side of his head in pressure and pain. The right half of his head felt like it was filled with shards of glass and rusty blades, and when he rolled to his left side to try to get away from it, he felt the slivers of pain start to drop one by one into the left side of his cranium. The bed was suffocating; too soft, too yielding, allowing movement with every breath he took and with every thought he had. He had to get away from it to a surface that was more stable. 

Stumbling as he got up, he lurched into the bathroom and gingerly lay on the bathroom floor. He wasn’t given to migraine-related nausea as a rule, but weathering an episode in the loo had certain advantages just in case. He lay on his right side, pressing the painful part of his head against the cold tile and trying to resist the temptation to writhe and whimper. He thought about what it would be like if his head actually exploded this time around; it made sense, really. No one’s head could withstand pressure like this; it was only a matter of time. It would just explode, and tomorrow, John would come down and find brains all over the walls, but he was a doctor. He would understand why Sherlock’s head had exploded, and it would all be fine. There was something wrong with that reasoning, Sherlock thought, but he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. No matter. If only his head would go ahead and explode, he’d be out of his misery, and he wouldn’t have to puzzle out the problems with the logic.

About half an hour later, he heard John’s door open; the sound was magnified like a gunshot, even though Sherlock was certain that John was trying to be quiet. He knew John often had interrupted sleep, and it was just his luck that tonight would be one of those nights.

John came down the steps and into the hall, walking blearily into the bathroom and flipping on the light, nearly tripping over Sherlock. 

“Whoa! Jeez, Sherlock, are you alright?” John asked.

“Headache,” Sherlock bit out. Just the attempt to speak jostled his head so that the fragments of glass and blades tumbled in his head, poking and cutting at every nerve in their path.

John quickly flipped out the light and crouched down at Sherlock’s side. “Migraine, from the looks of it. I didn’t know you got them; how long has this been going on?”

“Since uni,” Sherlock said, the desire to roll into a ball warring with the need to remain absolutely still. “They aren’t frequent.”

“Do you have anything to take for them? Triptans?” John said softly. Sherlock could barely see the outlines of John’s dressing gown pooling around his feet as he knelt at Sherlock’s side. The pain and the lateness and John’s disembodied voice lent an element of the surreal to the happenings.

“No, triptans are,” Sherlock swallowed, remembering. “Really not good. They make me disoriented, tingly, dissociated, not worth it,” he ground out, remembering the few times he’d tried the rescue medications and felt so out of control that he deemed the cure worse than the migraine.

“What do you take then?”

“Ibuprofen. Nothing. Whatever,” Sherlock said. It was hard to concentrate, hard to remember what it was he was supposed to do to make this increasingly intolerable pain go away. One of the worst parts of these episodes was the lack of control over his own mind; he couldn’t concentrate long enough to remember what to do to help himself. In the past, he had been known to lose track and take too much medication or, more frequently, forget to take any at all.

“And have you today? Taken anything, that is,” John said. “I know you didn’t drink at dinner.”

“No. Forgot. It just,” Sherlock swallowed. “Got away from me.”

“OK,” John said. “Let me get a few things, and I’ll be right back.”

Sherlock could hear John go out into the hallway and move quietly to turn on the dimmest lamp they had in the sitting room. He then went into the kitchen, where Sherlock could hear him take down a mug, draw some water, and start the microwave, the constant whirring like sandpaper on the nerves of Sherlock’s head. 

He heard John catch the microwave after one beep, stopping it and easing the door open before it could make too much more noise. Then, some more rustling, and John had returned to the bathroom, where he slid down carefully with his back to the wall until he sat at Sherlock’s head, arranging some things between his thighs as he reached over to help Sherlock sit.

“OK, think you can sit up for me?” he asked. “I want you to take some ibuprofen with some coffee if you can stand it. It’s instant, but I figured quick over quality in this case,” John said. Sherlock could hear the small smile.

Sherlock let John help him sit up, and he took the pills and coffee. The change in position made waves of rainbow colored light pulse around everything he looked at, including John, sitting there in the near-dark with a nimbus of color around him.

“Coffee? But why do you want me awake?” Sherlock fumbled, confused, his mouth working as slowly as his brain.

“Vasoconstrictor,” John said. “It’ll help relieve the pressure in your blood vessels, which are pressing against your skull. A lot of common migraine medicines have caffeine in them,” he said, softly.

Sherlock managed about half a cup of the coffee before he started feeling nauseous. “John, I’ve got to lie back down,” he said.

“Do you want me to help you back to bed?” 

“No, can’t,” Sherlock said, trying to move without jarring his head. “Bed’s too soft. Floor’s cold. Need to stay here,” he said, positioning himself so he was lying on his side, facing away from John but with his back against John’s thigh, grounding him against the terrible pulses of pain that had now started gripping his head.

John grabbed the Union Jack pillow he had brought in from the sitting room and flipped it until its softest side was up before sliding it under Sherlock’s head. The pillow was softer than the tile of the floor but was still firm enough to keep his head from jostling around painfully.

Sherlock was surprised to feel John’s hand drop to the junction of his neck and his shoulder, warm and gentle yet hinting at the strength the man had. 

“This OK?” John asked, starting to massage the muscle. Sherlock made a noise of assent; it really was a bit more than OK, the skillful massage causing some of the tension to bleed out and dissipate.

“Now,” John said softly. “What we need is something pleasant to think about. What’s the best thing you can tell me?”

“You already know all about solving the case, John,” Sherlock slurred, wondering what John was on about.

“No, maybe something nicer than a band of thieves,” John said with a smile Sherlock could hear. “Tell me about your grandmother. You said she was French, but you didn’t say much else. What was she like?”

Still wondering at the line of questioning, Sherlock followed along, too pained and disoriented to fight. “Grand-mère Vernet? We didn’t see much of her,” he said. “But she had a lovely house in the country, with a kitchen garden right outside the door.” He found himself thinking of a few visits from his childhood.

“I’ll bet that made her a wonderful cook. What did she grow?” John continued.

“Courgettes,” Sherlock said. “Other things, but I remember the courgettes. She was always worried she wasn’t going to get enough female flowers to get as many fruit as she wanted. Do you know how to tell the sex of a courgette flower, John?” Through the continuing pounding in his head, he could picture the sunny French countryside, and the scene started to feel like a respite from the agony.

“Hadn’t occurred to me to try. Guess I thought I’d ask one if I needed to know,” John laughed softly. “Why don’t you tell me.”

"You have to look at the stems,” Sherlock said softly. “The males are on narrow stems; the females have the small fruit sitting behind the blossom. The males come on first, to train the bees where to come and pollinate.” Sherlock’s voice grew softer and softer as he nestled gingerly into the Union Jack pillow. “Grand-mère was always worried about the bees.”

Sherlock muttered a few more words here and there about stems and fruits and squash reproduction, and John made affirmative noises and rubbed at Sherlock’s shoulder and neck until Sherlock dropped into a light doze.

When he woke, he deduced that a couple of hours had passed. He could see the light from a waking London start to creep into the sitting room and be reflected into the loo. He could feel John’s body still behind his, propped up asleep against the wall but with his hand still curved around Sherlock’s shoulder. This time, when Sherlock moved his head, he didn’t feel the shards of pointy agony cutting into his cranium but rather a floaty emptiness, as if his head were about to drift away. Possibly, the end of the migraine.

“John,” Sherlock said softly.

“Yeah, right here,” John said, coming quickly awake. “What do you need?”

“I think,” Sherlock said, gingerly starting to press himself to a sitting position, “if I am very careful, and I don’t move my head very much, and we’re both very quiet, I might be able to get myself back to my bedroom.”

John rose on popping knees and supported Sherlock as he got up, then guided him with a light touch back into his bedroom. Sherlock had placed one knee on the bed and was preparing to climb in, when John stopped him.

“Wait,” he said, still modulating his voice. John quickly pulled back the twisted covers to straighten the bottom sheet, then smoothed the top sheet, blanket, and duvet back up neatly before turning back a corner. He quickly took each pillow and gave it a fluff before turning it over to a side that had not been exposed to sweat the previous night. He then gestured for Sherlock to lie down, which Sherlock did with a grateful sigh.

“I’m going to text Lestrade and tell him that you won’t be in contact about the case until the afternoon at earliest,” John said, heading for the door, “and then I’m going to grab a shower and get to the surgery. But you text if it comes back, or if you need anything.”

“’M fine now,” Sherlock said. Then, “John? You didn’t have to sit up with me. I’ve taken care of these headaches by myself for years.” Struggling to say what he really meant, he added, “You’ll be tired at work.”

“Not the first time I’ve missed a few hours’ sleep before working,” John said with a small laugh. “Not even the first time I’ve stayed up all night because of you.” Then, thinking a moment, John seemed to gain the courage to say something that he also had been struggling with. “Having a friend means you don’t have to handle these things alone.”

It might have been the migraine hangover, but Sherlock felt a sudden wave of sentiment and smiled into the pillow. “Have a good day at work, John,” he said softly, as he closed his eyes and John left the room.

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of discussion surrounds the moment in The Blind Banker when Sherlock introduces John to Sebastian Wilkes as his friend, only to have John correct the statement to “colleague.” I give John a bit of a pass here, because that episode seems to show the guys figuring out the direction of their relationship. John is not yet sure if Sherlock is – or wants to be – more than a flatmate and a colleague, while Sherlock continually demonstrates that he’s so accustomed to doing things on his own that he forgets to take John’s contribution into account. I think something along the way must have happened for the two to realize they were growing into a true friendship, and it seemed a good way to end a horrible night for Sherlock.
> 
> Oh, and in case you were wondering: the bit about courgette sex is true.


End file.
